Customer Reviews

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cheese Making

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well I'm all of 4 months into my cheese making hobby, joined a 'herd share' in order to get raw milk as well.
This book offers plenty of practical advice that I can read over and over until I feel brave enough to head onto the next recipe. There is something to learn each time I attempt a recipe and found the most important practical advice that spoke to me. You need to have patience to make cheese. Maybe other books mention this but I finally heard it when I read it here. The practicality of this book takes away the idea that you need to learn some ancient magic to be successful.

When you are ready to start making cheese this book is an excellent starting place!

As a licensed cheesemaker, author (The Farmstead Creamery Advisor) and instructor on cheesemaking, I like to buy and personally review all cheesemaking books. This is a great one! Very few make my recommendation list, but James Leverentz's book will be at the top! It is easy to read, logically presented, and best of all includes some secrets and tidbits of advanced techniques that will help prevent frustration when making cheese. While it is always tricky to avoid giving beginning students too much information, by withholding some of this more complicated information, the student will most certainly have questions and problems that they would not be able to answer and solve. Great job Mr. Leverentz! PS, we also always recommend your company, Leeners Supply.
Gianaclis Caldwell

This book was recommended by a lovely lady that taught a cheese making class....she indicated that it gave the most direct, simple clearest information in reference to cheesemaking she had ever found (she had been making cheese for 25 years.)
I work with raw milk and every recipe that I have tried has worked beautifully....I highly recommend this book to the novice as it gives explicit information about potential trouble shooting for things that didn't work as well as thought.

I ordered this book for my parents who were looking to increase their knowledge of cheese making. It was easy for them to follow and gave them a multitude of refrences. They love it and the name makes mom smile.

On the up side this book emphasizes the importance of sterility in the process so at least you won't give yourself food poisoning. It is consistently a bit vague on details i.e. "warm slowly to X degrees". An actual time frame is more useful such as warm to x degrees over 10 min. Most heinously it encourages users to microwave their cheese curds just like the vulcanizing process for making tires. Not surprisingly the end product of using this process yields rubbery tough cheese. In summary, as per the title, the book is suitable for IDIOTS.

While the general info was good, I was disappointed that there were not many recipes. Really, though, most of the books with good recipes also contained the same general info, if not as extensively drawn out to make into an entire book. This book could have easily been condensed into a single chapter within a really great book.

This book is full of too much info. It covers only the simplest recipes and it takes over a 100 pages.